Mar. 16, 2013

In 2012, The Enquirer investigation “Neighborhoods in Peril” revealed our urban neighborhoods in trouble, losing people and homes while property values fall. Today, we launch a Forum series to bring attention to what they need to thrive. Over the next few months, we’ll take a look at the problems holding the urban core neighborhoods back, talk to local and national experts and listen to what residents say they need. I’d love to hear your ideas.

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Living in downtown Cincinnati is hot, with the growing roster of apartments nearly full and one of the newest, the riverfront-situated Current at the Banks, leased up.

But just three miles to the west, on McPherson Street in East Price Hill, 14 houses are vacant and many others are in disrepair, the damage from a decades-long decline that was sharply aggravated by the recession and the housing crisis.

Two city neighborhoods, within a 10-minute drive, one growing, the other struggling. It’s just one illustration of what is increasingly becoming a bifurcated city, where Downtown and its neighbor to the north, Over-the-Rhine, have benefited, rightly, from sustained public and private investment, while other neighborhoods like East Price Hill deteriorate.

The revitalization of Downtown and Over-the-Rhine has been critical to the city’s future. But if Cincinnati as a whole is to thrive, its neighborhoods need to do well too.

Places like Westwood, Northside, Oakley and Madisonville were built for people to live, with solid houses, sidewalks, stores, libraries, banks and bakeries. They are places where the American Dream happened. Where people worked hard and owned their homes. That idea is still essential to healthy neighborhoods. People who live in the home they own cut the grass, plant flowers, fix the roof, volunteer at school, watch out for the neighbors and call the police when there’s a problem. They make neighborhoods work.

But in recent years, many of Cincinnati’s urban neighborhoods have suffered steep declines in the number of homes lived in by their owners. In East Price Hill, just since 2000, a 25-percent drop in owner-occupied homes occurred. Other neighborhoods once considered solid places to buy homes also saw significant declines, according to 2010 U.S. Census data – Clifton Heights/Fairview, 21 percent; Corryville, 17 percent; West Price Hill, 19 percent; and in North Fairmount, a disaster: a 39 percent decline in owner-occupied homes.

It’s a crisis that grew quietly until the last five to 10 years, when it became too big to ignore. But in crisis lies opportunity. And Cincinnati’s neighborhoods are brimming with opportunity. Much of the housing stock in our urban neighborhoods is solid and salvageable. Two generations, the 20- to 30-year-old millennials and the 48- to 65-year-old baby boomers have rediscovered urban, walkable neighborhoods as places to raise families or feather their empty nests. Cincinnati has a long history of neighborhood activism and self-governance that has bred community leaders. City Hall leaders for the most part recognize that healthy neighborhoods are essential to attracting new residents and to reversing the decline of the urban populations. Funding has been committed to promising projects.

The entire region has a stake in how the urban neighborhoods fare. Cincinnati is the core of a region that includes 15 counties and three states. Without a healthy core, the rest of the region suffers. Blight, like rust, has a way of creeping outward. “If you don’t attack problems in the core of the city, they will spread out,” says Kathy Schwab, executive director of Local Initiatives Support Corp., the Avondale-based office that supports neighborhood projects.

Importantly, Cincinnati’s neighborhoods have committed residents and advocates who are persistent about what they do: organize for improvement.

In the Price Hill neighborhoods, a group called Price Hill Will is working one house at a time to help rescue East, West and Lower Price Hill, three neighborhoods whose population taken together is greater than the city of Covington. The nonprofit buys salvageable vacant houses, usually in foreclosure, on streets that are still relatively in good shape. With limited resources, the group focuses on saving houses on streets that still have a chance and can’t afford a home languishing vacant. Contractors gut the interior and transform it into a contemporary space, complete with granite countertops, polished hardwood floors and Ikea bath fixtures. Price Hill Will then sells the thoroughly rehabbed house, usually at a loss.

The goal: shore up streets that still have a chance, prevent deterioration. And stimulate the market for housing. “Our mission is not so much the buyer; it’s the neighborhood,” says Matt Strauss, one of the handful of staffers of Price Hill Will.

In many ways, the Price Hill neighborhoods have a lot of what it will take to restore Cincinnati’s neighborhoods as places to move into rather than out of. Organizations such as Price Hill Will are invested in making the neighborhood better. Santa Maria Community services, a 115-year-old social-service group started by the Sisters of Charity, is one. Schools, 14 of them, including Elder, Seton and Oyler high schools, can keep families engaged. Beautiful churches are touchstones, including “The Home of the Magnificod,” St. William, where a drive-through fish fry caters to convenience for those who observe Fridays during Lent.

A cool coffee shop, a small thing, but considered by some a must-have for an up-and-coming neighborhood, is a focal point in the Holy Family area. Corner Bloc Coffee serves up macchiatos with non-homogenized cream from an Ohio dairy, and is a comfortable gathering place, open late, with a baby grand piano in one corner and jazz on Tuesday nights.

Determined residents such as Bill Burwinkel organize others. Burwinkel, a “newcomer” in Price Hill, having lived there only 40 years, didn’t like what he saw happening around his home church, Holy Family. Buildings languished vacant, boarded up. An apartment building at Price and Hawthorne fell into foreclosure, a block away from the church, the owner abandoned it and squatters moved in.

“We decided to do something about it; we bought the building,” Burwinkel says.

He and business partner Tom Koopman converted it to five contemporary apartments, all rented now at market rates.

On the ground floor is the Flats Gallery, an art gallery run by the faculty and staff of the College of Mount St. Joseph.

Across the street, they bought a small commercial strip and prepped it for new retail.

A couple blocks up on Price Avenue, they bought vacant, dilapidated houses and tore them down.

Like many of Cincinnati’s urban neighborhoods, East and West Price Hill are neighborhoods in transition. They have opportunities now to make the transition work, maintain and even grow their populations, bring spark back to their business districts and restore their vast stock of housing.

It’s unlikely they will see the tens of millions in investment that’s been poured into Downtown and Over-the-Rhine.

But getting it right will take cooperation, dedication, commitment and yes, funding, from residents, business, schools and government. ⬛

How the Price Hills have changed

The population and number of housing units all declined there from 2000 to 2010, while vacancies rose at an even faster rate, an Enquirer analysis shows.